Christmas without homemade EggNog is like… well, Christmas with no EggNog. It is a vital component of any Christmas party and for a fan like me, frankly any time is EggNog time.

I guess I like the stuff as I err on heavy on the ‘Nog’ – making it ‘adulty’ and bloomin’ alcoholic. The stronger the better. Added to that I like to use top notch booze. Tradition dictates brandy or rum for the adulting, modern thinkers like bourbon. Me? I like rum. Good cask aged rum, but experiment. Find what you like.

Something I do need to remind you of, dear reader, is that the Egg part of EggNog is raw. So exercise caution. Use good eggs and make sure they are fresh.

Seb’s EggNog (makes 4-6 cups)

Ingredients You Need:

6 large fresh eggs

250ml double cream (‘heavy’ if you are US based)

500ml whole milk

300g caster sugar (‘superfine’ or ‘bakers’ if you are US based)

375ml rum or brandy (try mixing)

Nutmeg to serve

Gear You’ll Need:

2 large mixing bowls

Whisk or stand mixer

Scales for weighing

Measuring jug for liquids

Nutmeg grater

Sealable bottle/mason jar

Pitcher or punchbowl/ladle for serving

How To Make It:

Separate the eggs. We want the yolks so keep the whites (make a meringue!)

Get the sugar and eggs into the mixing bowl, or the bowl of the standmixer if you are using one

Whisk gently until the yolks and sugar have combined fully. You will notice a change in color when this happens. The yolk/sugar combination will take on a lemony hue

Once nicely combined, add the cream and milk slowly and keep gently whisking. Take your time. Incorporating the milk and cream should take around 2 minutes

When you have the egg nicely combined, get your nog in. Again, slowly. Keep whisking until all the liquor is incorporated

The final step is patience. Decant from the bowl to your bottle//mason jar and let it marinade in the fridge. I would suggest at least overnight.

To serve. Pour from the marinading container into your pitcher/punchbowl and enjoy!

We are always interested in seeing what other Solution Providers in the Microsoft Cloud space are thinking. One that I keenly follow is Brighter Days, a small boutique consultancy over in beautiful New Zealand. Founded a couple of years ago by Lee Stevens, a relocated Brit who I am honoured to call a friend, Brighter Days is breaking ground by playing with the big boys despite being a small concern.

Lee and the team are very focused on the Microsoft ‘Digital Workplace’ and the journey that customers need to make to leverage the best from the Microsoft Cloud.

At ProvisionPoint, our reason for existence is enablement. We help organisations get more from Office 365 by making complex or privileged administration tasks assignable to users in simple ways, enabling them to get what they need from Office 365 without relying on support or administration resources.

Why is enablement so important? A key factor is the avoidance of doubt as to the value of Office 365. In other words; helping to ensure that moving to Office 365 is not seen as a waste of time, money, or energy.

Lee’s 4 points are very valid and we certainly agree with them, but I wanted to add a couple more which are close to our hearts as they help to drive our vision for ProvisionPoint.

#5. Not Enough Stakeholder ManagementBusiness leaders need to know that their investments are driving value. Although an often hoped for outcome of moving to Office 365 is lowered cost of ownership, the transition is always going to be expensive. The old adage ‘There is no such thing as an IT project. All IT projects are business change projects with a technical bent’ rings very true when moving to the cloud. This investment needs to be carefully managed with the people writing the cheques.When the business leaders are not being fed good news, benefit statements, and general user happiness doubt will inevitably begin to form as to whether the move is a success.Business leaders are egotistical and whimsical creatures, they need to know that their decisions (or approvals) are paying dividends. Make sure they know.

#6. Not Enough User ManagementThe weakest link in your IT delivery is the user. Fact. Users are our customer but they are also our most staunch antagonist. Users are our reason for existence but they are also the single largest cause of pain.What is the ‘secret sauce’ for happy users? Engagement. They need to feel that the tools they have meet their needs. They need to feel that they are consulted on change. They need to understand why something new is better.If you engage with your users early, in their language, and in a maintained way you will greatly increase your chances of Office 365 success.I am no user adoption expert, but what I do know is that if somebody is telling me and showing me why something different is better, I am happier. Simple really.

#7. Losing Sight of the FundamentalsIt is often said that the most successful stock brokers are those that ‘focus on the fundamentals’. Like the stock market, with Office 365 focusing on the fundamentals is all about getting the basic things understood by all concerned.Most users focus on a basic set of tools. Get email, word processing, spreadsheets, and audio/video calling right and everything else will follow. Spend too much time on selling users (or management) on the shiny stuff in Office 365 at the cost of the fundamentals and you will increase your chances of perceived failure.Why? The shiny stuff is often immature or in ‘beta’ (early release) so likely to be feature incomplete or flaky to use. No matter how good email is (and let us face it, Exchange Online is epic) give users a shoddy experience with Teams (for instance) and that is all they will remember. Focus on the fundamentals and add the shiny stuff later.

#8. Selling the FutureI am dropping this one in as almost an afterthought. Why? I have seen it twice in recent times. Technical stakeholders selling the business on something that Office 365 will (or in some cases, might) do at some point in the future. ‘We should adopt now so we can use ‘Freedom’ (for clarity an entirely made up Office 365 feature name) when it comes out in Q4!’Selling dreams (‘vapourware’ or ‘projectorware’ in old money) is dangerous – do not do it!

Now released, initial reading of the preliminary RCA of the 4th September (2018) Azure outage further reinforced to me the intrinsic value that the cloud brings to IT operations of any scale.

You read that right, reinforced my view, no diminishing in sight.

Available here, the preliminary RCA highlights a number of key points that, in my view, clearly demonstrate why the cloud is the right choice for so many organisations, particularly if they operate at scale.

The key question for me is; “what would you do if this was your datacentre?”. For me this is where the rubber hits the road with Azure (and, to be fair, other cloud services such as AWS) especially in IaaS workload scenarios.

Self-hosting organisations of any size simply do not have the resources to match the response of Microsoft during this outage. Critically, the word resources is not just about people in this case, it is about resources of all types:

Human – Microsoft are resplendent with some of the world’s best engineers, many of whom literally wrote the book on cloud-scale operations and incident response

Compute/Storage – the sheer scale of the Microsoft compute and storage resources mean that the is always somewhere else that workloads can run – be it intra-datacentre or extra-datacentre, Microsoft just have iron laying around, available, all the time

Resilience – Microsoft has invested millions (possibly billions) of dollars in ensuring that the very fabric of Azure can function regardless of the state of failure. Azure is like the Starship Enterprise, no matter how ‘damaged’ it is a redundant/backup system can be switched on in a relatively short period of time. Sure, this is a benefit of having oodles of compute/storage, but it has to be wired together in the right way to make it beneficial and it needs to be seamlessly switchable to minimise or avoid data loss

Orchestration – The investment made in both process and tooling means that the switching of services, the restoration of services, and the initial geo-enablement of services is practically seamless for most users of Azure. Simply put, it just works

For me, the nay-sayers of Azure are just ill-informed and (in some cases) just plain wrong.

The moaning about whatever beef folks had with Azure during the outage is simply misplaced. If catastrophic failure of the type experienced in the South Central Region had happened in a corporate datacentre, they would probably still be working in a ‘failover’ or ‘recovering’ mode as I write, or worse – they would be simply offline.

Running an IT operation is, and always will be, 99% swan swimming and 1% abject chaos. With Azure, at least you stand a fighting chance of staying on top of the chaos when disaster strikes, without it you are simply stopped. Dead.

I have been known to say that the pig is the tastiest of all the domesticated animals, but this is a philosophical position based on the total tastiness across the whole beast.

For roasting, especially for a special occasion, the cow – specifically the rib of a cow – stands alone.

Tasty, moist, crispy around the edges. A rib of beef is the king of roasted meats. If well selected, properly seasoned & seared, and then cooked & rested for the right amount of time nothing in the world beast roasted rib of beef.

Choosing which rib to cook and serve for me is about the occasion. If you’re sharing with your sweatheart (or feeling hungry and elegant) then the Fore Ribs are the place to be. The classic ‘Cote de boeuf’ is a single rib (ideal for two to share) and is my personal favourite. Moving along you will have 2, 3, 4, or 5 rib cuts being a great choice depending on number of people. The Fore Ribs are the ‘friend ribs’ – not too flashy, fattier, and full of flavour.

Moving ‘rumpwards’ you will get to the Wing Rib and then onto the Sirloin on the bone – both what I would call ‘event’ roasts. More elegant, less fatty, a little flashier, and a real conversation piece (if that is your kind of thing) when brought to the table. For me, you are into 4-6 people minimum, simply because the cost per lb/kg starts to drift up and you may as well make a spectacle of it!

Buying decent beef can be hard. Find a butcher – supermarkets just do not carry the quality of meat you are looking for – and make sure your butcher knows where the beef is from (preferably knowing the farmer personally), gets the beef as a whole side, dry ages the beef (minimum 21 days in my view), and that the beef is from grass fed cattle – only a handful of rules!

Mu number one guideline with good beef? Use your eyes. You want a well marbled (appropriate for the cut with less marbling as you head towards the rump) and you want a rich, deep. almost purple colouration to the meat itself. This is the sign of well dry aged beef, that rich colour is everything.

My final thought? There is only one way to eat roast rib of beef – medium rare – if you like it cooked more, you are on your own!

Roasted Rib of Beef (will serve 2-3 people per kg bone in)

Ingredients You Need:

Rib of beef – sized for your needs

Rapeseed oil

Salt & Pepper

Gear You’ll Need:

Bastard hot oven (240°C)

Heavy bottom frying pan large enough to hold the rib

Roasting dish with trivet

Serving dish for resting

Carving board

Sharp carving knife and fork

Foil

Oven gloves

Tea towel (for wafting your smoke detector if your pan is hot enough)

How To Make It:

Oven on, high heat (240°C)

Get the roasting dish into the oven

Get the pan on the hob heat

Wait until the pan is smoking hot (and ensure the oven is up to temp)

Rub a little of the oil over the meat of the rib

Season the rib, all over – top, bottom, sides, everywhere – be generous, in fact – be over generous

Get the rib into the smoking hot pan and sear well on all sides at least 3 minutes per side

Once seared, grab the roasting dish out of the oven, pop the rib onto the dish upright (bones pointing to the sky!) and get that bad boy back into the oven

Bring the oven temp down to 200°C and set a timer – 30 minutes per kilo (2.2lb) – and be precise in knowing the weight of your rib

Once the timer completes, turn the oven off – DO NOT OPEN THE DOOR

Set a timer, 5 mins per kilo, again be precise

Once the timer completes, take the rib out of the oven, place onto a warmed (but not too hot) serving dish, cover with tinfoil and leave to rest

Set a time, 5 mins per kilo, yet again – be precise

Once the timer completes, transfer to a carving board and serve – a super sharp knife will help with thin, elegant slices.

Bask in the glory, and I mean bask!

Worktop Tips:

If your rib is refrigerated, take her out of the fridge at least an hour before you want to roast

When you are searing, do not touch the beef, let it sizzle and caramelise – trust me

Want to get even more flavour in? Light a hot, hot barbecue and sear the beef until well charred. You will not regret this, charred beef is tasty in a way that cannot be beat, once charred follow the guidelines as above reducing cooking time by 5 minutes per kilo (resting the same)

Using rapeseed oil should keep the smoke down a little – it has a higher smoking point than olive oil but I would open windows – you are going to generate smoke if things are going right

Malbec is becoming the ‘de rigueur’ pairing with beef, driven by the ascendancy of amazing Argentine beef being more widely available. Merlot (especially South American) is also popular currently for the same reason.

For me though, I like a red Châteauneuf-du-Pape with roasted rib. The Grenache noir based blends from this AOC have the legs to carry the richness of roast rib with the added benefit of being suited to a special occasion and a conversation starter in its own right.

AIIM Forum 2018 took place in the ILEC centre in the IBIS Hotel in West London and I was there with extaCloud as sponsors of the event for the second year running.

As you would expect, the GDPR was high on the agenda at all times with almost every session throughout the day being focused on the hottest topic in the Information Management and Content Services worlds this year. Every sponsor in the exhibition hall had a GDPR story to tell with some focused on product, others on services.

extaCloud was continuing its launch of extaStor 365, our Records Management service for Office 365 and we had plenty of interest in this new and innovative product.

The highlight of the day for me was being part of the closing session panel – ‘GDPR, Where are we now?’ – an hour long discussion panel focused on the GDPR and impact to organisations now that (at the time of the session) the legislation has been in placed for a month.

Well attended, the session was hosted by our friend Atle from AIIM and my fellow panellists were Madi McAllister from the Church of England and Dai Davis an independent lawyer that focuses his practice on information privacy.

From today the new European Union Regulation – The General Data Protection Regulation – comes into effect.

Unless you have been under a rock for the last two years you will be well aware of this immense piece of legislation. It is a game-changer with regards to how personal information is gathered, processed and stored. With all 550 million (or so) EU citizens protected by the GDPR the landscape of personal information in Europe is being changed forever.

I was recently making some changes to my LinkedIn profile, nothing out of the ordinary there, I guess. Seeking inspiration I decided to go take a peek at some of the profiles of my peers as I was pondering sprucing up my tag-line.

Exploring, clicking and browsing from associate to associate, I noticed something that had previously evaded me — there are fewer people doing any actual work.

What made me think this?

The sheer number of daft titles and tag-lines.

In less than ten minutes I came across half a dozen ‘Thought Leaders’, three ‘mavens’, a number of ‘ninjas’, a handful of ‘rock stars’ and even a ‘guru’.

What in the blazes are all these? Who the heck is doing the actual work?

Whatever happened to the ‘Sales Manager’, the ‘Software Developer’, the ‘Marketing Exec.’ or the plain-old ‘CEO’?

I will tell you what happened to them — self-proclaimed marketing happened to them.

The Bullhorn Mentality is born.

Folks now believe it is no longer good enough to be be proud of and factual about what they do. Belief now exists that it is necessary to be flamboyantly public, bullshitty and noisy about it — even if these proclamations are in the eye of the author only.

LinkedIn profiles now seem to be about being shouty, shouty and thrice shouty with an almost total disregard for what is being shouted — the Bullhorn Mentality.

The trend of fewer folks just stating on their profiles what it is they actually do is becoming a plague and is a surefire sign of the times.

Everybody is planning for the future. Permanently.

Don’t get me wrong. I get it. LinkedIn is a platform for self-promotion. It’s a platform for your next role, a calling card for that next speaking gig or media quote. Believe me, I get that. I recognize that in a comical, borderline ironic way, the act of writing this post is me being shouty, right? Perhaps.

All his life has he looked away… to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was… what he was doing.

When Jedi Master Yoda is talking with shimmery Ben Kenobi (in the middle third of The Empire Strikes Back for you under-rock dwellers) he perfectly describes the foundation of my gripe. The seeming lack of understanding that if you focus on now, the future will take care of itself.

Platforms like LinkedIn provide means of exposure for everybody so the lack of focus in the present is becoming relentless. This is the crux my gripe.

Nobody is taking pride in what they’re doing and the fact they’re doing it well. So focused are they on self-promotion for the future that in an effort to buff up, LinkedIn members are just writing nonsense into their profiles.

Blatant self-promotion? Moi?

Let’s look at the term ‘Thought Leader’. It’s laughable. Trust me. You are NOT a ‘Thought Leader’. Thought Leadership status is earned. It’s ‘voted on’ by your peers. It’s awarded, in a manner of speaking. If you’re writing it about yourself you’re not even Thought Leader material in my view. Best case? You’re a ‘Thought Repeater’, a serial re-tweeter in more than 280 characters.

Let’s examine being a ‘maven’. Just look at how Gladwell (in his book ‘The Tipping Point’) defines the usage — ‘(a maven is) often the first to become aware of new or nascent trends’ — it’s pretty likely you’re not even first in the queue in Starbucks, let alone in identifying trends in your given field.

Let’s think about being a ‘ninja’. Nope. You’ve failed. Silence, invisibility, misdirection — all traits of a ninja — by drawing attention to being one, ninja you ain’t.

What about ‘rock star’? If you’re the front for (or for that matter a musician in) a band with at least 10 million unit sales, I’ll allow it. If not, you need to be ‘renowned or revered in your field of accomplishment’ [//wiktionary.org/rockstar] so think Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking or Sheldon Cooper like status. No? Fail.

My, what a big chopper!

In writing this, I was reminded of an anecdote. For the life of me, I cannot recall when or where I heard this story, but I do like it.

Folks are at a party. A fancy party. In a fancy, fancy house. The party is in full swing when a helicopter flies over and lands on the lawn at the rear of the house. A man and a tall lady step out and stride confidently up the steps into the house. Greeted by the host, they get a drink and mingle. Awe struck, one of the hired servers asks the man, “Is that your helicopter?” The man smiles, “Sure is!” Impressed, the server continues, “What do you do to make enough money to have your own helicopter?” Smiling again, the man responds with a wink “I’m in sales.” Later on, after the guests have left, the host is thanking the staff and says to the curious server “I hear you spoke with Rupert?” “Rupert?” replied the server. “Yeah, the guy in the helicopter was Rupert Murdoch, the media guy…”

The point is clear. Murdoch. A global player, mover and shaker, influencer and some would say ‘total bastard’ saw himself very simply. He was a ‘sales guy’ and he knew he was good at it, so he was proud of it.

Let’s go back to basics with LinkedIn.

Be proud of what you do and why you do it. Be honest about what you do in that pride.

If you sell, say it. If you program computers, say it. If you makes cups and saucers, say it.

Let’s de-bullshit-ify our profiles. Let’s say what we do. Let’s take pride in our chosen vocations. Let’s be less focused on saying we’re leaders, experts and ‘keynote speakers’ and increase our pride in the fact we’re workers. Hard workers. Workers focused on the now, knowing the future will take care of itself.

If you play in the Microsoft Ecosystem, especially in the SharePoint space, you’ll likely be aware of the recent brouhaha surrounding a marketing campaign brought to life by independent software vendor (ISV) AvePoint.

In the campaign, AvePoint — a privately held (see later) software business founded in 2001 — are taking a major shot at long-term competitor Metalogix.

Nothing new in that, right? Competitors are always sniping at each other, right? Not this time around.

This time it’s personal.

When it comes to marketing, taking a shot is usually calling smack on your competitors offerings. It’s lighthearted, if heartfelt. Shots are typically made in the form of ‘our <insert product here> is better than their <insert competitors product here> because it has more/less/wider/shinier <insert comparison here>’. Unimaginative? Sure. Commonplace nonetheless.

This time, the shot taken was a seriously aggressive example of smack talk, like nothing I’ve seen in our industry. It was simple, succinct and direct in the extreme.

‘Attn: Metalogix is for Sale’ [sic].

That’s right. AvePoint fired a salvo straight at the entire Metalogix business. They overtly stated that with Metalogix ‘for sale’, current or future Metalogix customers were at risk with a ‘dark cloud hanging over Metalogix’ [sic].

Now that is smack talk. Implication that the future for Metalogix as an entire businesswas uncertain and therefore created unnecessary risk for its current or future customers. This is a form of ‘FUD’ marketing (fear, uncertainty, doubt for those not in the know) taken to a whole new level.

Is this good marketing? I’m no marketeer, so not really qualified to respond to my own question (that said, not being a marketeer doesn’t mean I don’t have further comment which will become increasingly apparent through the post) but I do know that FUD is old hat. It’s 1980’s IBM. It’s passe.

Besides being old hat, this campaign agitated me. Why does it agitate me? Bear with me dear reader. Read on.

So is Metalogix for sale?

Like AvePoint, Metalogix is a privately held (again, see later) software business and akin to AvePoint, Metalogix was also founded in 2001 and operates as an ISV in the Microsoft technology space. Notwithstanding the difference in size of the two businesses (AvePoint is roughly three times the size of Metalogix so far as I can tell from some quick web searches) they’re pretty similar businesses in reality.

Why is this notional similarity important? Whether they state it or not. Ambitious, growth seeking, privately held companies are always ‘for sale’, especially in the tech sector. They know it. The opportunity hungry equity partnership/investment world knows it. Their wider competitor and partner market knows it. In fact, the only people that might not know it are the customers and let’s face it. Why the bloody hell should they?

Let’s look at both the actors in this spectacle and how they fit into my assertion.

In the Red corner…

Part of AvePoint was sold in 2007 to Summit Partners (a private equity investment firm focused on growth) and another part was sold to Goldman Sachs (a pretty big global financial player you’ve likely heard of) in 2014.

So both, in recent times, have had all or part of their business ‘for sale’. Fact.

The reality is that privately held businesses that are seeking aggressive or accelerated growth always have a ‘for sale’ sign up on the front lawn. In the main, this vendor position is not an ‘entire business for sale’ position, it’s generally a ‘we’ll sell you a chunk of the business for cash and advice’ position, but on occasion the position will be ‘you can have the business, lock stock’.

The key here is what constitutes being ‘for sale’ and whether, as the basis of the AvePoint campaign implies, this constitutes risk for customers (and by extension employees and partners).

What is important to understand is that this selling ‘part, some or all of the business’ approach is a valid growth strategy. It’s an understood growth strategy. It’s a strategy used by businesses of all shapes and sizes, in all sectors of industry, all over the world.

In short — it’s one method a company can utilize to grow quickly.

Does this represent risk to customers? Sometimes. Let’s examine what being ‘for sale’ could mean and how that could present risk.

For Sale ‘Lock Stock’ — The Metalogix Story

Metalogix was acquired by Permira ‘lock stock’ in 2014. It’s likely that previous shareholders, particularly the executive team, still hold a percentage of the business, but as an ‘acquisition’ it’s fair to say that Permira will now hold a significant majority of the shares in the business.

Is this risky? Not in my view. Permira are a business specializing in growth acceleration — they buy (most of) a business and then, along with the incumbent executive/management team (assuming they survive, a different discussion is required for this subject), drive growth which will benefit all.

Clearly, there are numerous examples of where a lock stock acquisition has resulted in a resoundingly negative outcome for all concerned. In the technology ecosystem there are thousands of examples of companies acquiring a competitor/up-and-comer/tech-rich start-up, taking the resources or intellectual property they want, and spitting out the remains. In this situation employees, customers and partners can get left by the side of the road in a smoldering, embittered heap and the only winner is the ‘raider’ that drove the deal. In the technology ecosystem Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, IBM, the list of tech giants (and, to be fair — not so giants) doing this is almost endless — and generally accepted as a valid modus operandi.

Why does this happen? If we ignore the emotionless, driven stereotype of the corporate raider. Every owner (regardless of who or what they are — person, business or equity partner) has a price point for exit. If the price is right, they’ll sell. It’s in the rules of the game. It’s the spirit of the entrepreneur. It’s why successful people are successful. Knowing when to ‘get out’ is a key business skill and those that succeed know when the price is right. Customers, partners, employees and internet based commentators just need to accept this. When somebody offers you a big enough piece of cheese for your company, you’ll take it. Done deal. Laugh all the way to the Lamborghini dealership. Drive into the sunset. Fade to black.

This is the reason raiding privately held companies works — regardless of whether the raider is an industry specialist or not. Think Gordon Gekko. Think ‘Greed, for lack of a better word, is good’. We’re not supposed to like it, but we have no choice but to face it — shit happens.

Although a ‘lock stock’ sale, I’d confidently assert that the Permira acquisition of Metalogix is different from the above. Permira are not a raider. The acquisition isn’t an asset stripping raid, it’s a growth investment and will benefit customers, employees and partners in the short, medium and long term. Permira are a proven growth partner and they have, historically, invested for the long-haul.

Sure. At some point they will seek an exit. Will this be bad for interested parties? Who can tell? Common sense tells us that for Permira to sellMetalogix means that somebody wants to buy Metalogix. History tells us that most equity partner exits take one of three forms: IPO (initial public offering — ‘floating on the stock market’), on-going private sale or management buyout (‘MBO’). In general I would assert that all things being equal, in the case of Metalogix, none of these scenarios are likely to be bad for customers. An ISV that has received growth funding is typically going to be an attractive on-going concern for a future buyer. Unless they make dumb or latent product innovation decisions (which is largely nothing to do with ‘who’ owns the business) the future is surely bright for Metalogix and so its customers are safe enough.

Side Bar Note: Metalogix successfully ‘lock stock’ acquired the SharePoint focused business units of Syntergy, Idera and Axceler (in 2013, 2013 and 2014 respectively) and, with few exceptions, all concerned were happy with the outcome. These acquisitions almost certainly made Metalogix more attractive a prospect to Permira, further expanding the benefit to the customers, partners and employees retained from those previous acquisitions. Kinda playing to my point made above, granted, but facts nonetheless.

For Sale In part — The AvePoint Story

AvePoint ‘sold’ parts of their business to Goldman Sachs and Summit Partners in 2014 and 2007 respectively. Like Metalogix, these transactions were undoubtedly to enable growth, but they were, no matter how you dress it up, sales of parts of the business. Cash (or equivalent securities) went one way and shares went the other.

Clearly, when a transaction of this nature occurs, it’s broadly good news for all concerned. Incumbent management have recognized the need to inject cash to enable inorganic growth. Borrowing in the tech sector is a fools game (both for lender and borrower). Seeking investment through sale of shares is win-win.

Is it risky? If a business wants to grow, the exchange of cash and advice for shares is pretty standard and the risk to customers, partners and employees is generally pretty low. Complex deals with ratchets, funding release milestones and other contractual instruments can increase the risk, but generally for minority stake acquisitions the risk to the customer is low.

Will the partners seek an exit? Maybe. The exit pathways are similar: IPO, MBO, sell to other partner. There could well be special terms in the partnership agreements. Instruments to allow influence, resale, options to buy (more of the company) — the possibilities are only limited by the imagination of the parties involved.

The common thread in both situations is that the partners did it to make money. They’re not doing it for fun, sport or some form of philanthropic altruism. They’re doing it to generate return.

Genius or not?

On the basis of the above, AvePoint have, in my view, a teeny-tiny moral leg to stand on. This teeny-tiny leg is the only thing preventing me from calling them out as a full-on hypocrite (not that they care, and why the hells should they?).

If we take the view that the intent of their rather parochial campaign is actually based in highlighting the risk of a sale as opposed to highlighting being ‘for sale’ then their approach of selling pieces of their business, as compared to Metalogix selling lock stock, is indeed inherently less risky. This lends a small amount of credibility to the campaign, but not much. Score.

Going back to the marketing angle. I’ve stated in this post that I am not a marketeer, so not really qualified to comment on the suitability or credibility of the campaign, but what I do know is what I feel about this campaign.

It just feels cheap. It feels like lazy marketing. It feels like ‘evoca-marketing’ (I hope I’ve invented a new term, perhaps ‘evocating’ is better?). It’s marketing that is actually not focused at all on marketing product or business. It’s just there to evoke emotional response that generates debate, traffic, web hits and social media viral-ism.

If that’s the case then it worked. I’ve seen days of rumbling, dozens of posts, hundreds of social media comments and I have spent an hour or so writing this post. Heads have been turned. AvePoint are in the conversation. Score.

Does that make it right? I guess that’s about the lens you look through. If AvePoint wanted to generate a stir, it worked. From their perspective that’s ‘right’. I guess booking numbers will be the acid test for AvePoint. I’d love to see how their pipeline is influenced by this campaign. Positive or negative? I wonder.

What I can’t help wondering though, is this. Have we all been drawn in by a graduate marketing genius in Jersey City who, when staring at the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge one day, thought to themselves ‘fuck it, let’s stir the pot!’?

Maybe.

That said, at the end of the day, and in my view, it just feels all a bit sleazy because admitting it or not, AvePoint are just as up for sale as Metalogix.

Disclosure Note: In the past I have been compensated by Metalogix for evangelism and consulting services provided to them. I’m not employed by or currently engaged in any form of compensated activity with Metalogix so consider myself neutral in the field of play with regards to this post.

Recent financial data (see here) from Microsoft is suggesting that the shift of Microsoft customers away from traditional on-premises usage of products towards the Microsoft cloud is gathering momentum.

Despite the misgivings held by technology leaders within many customer organizations, the data is suggesting that the move of business productivity workloads to the cloud is well and truly underway, inferring that the historical concerns around, for instance, security (when organizational data is in the cloud), are diminishing.

Now that the cloud is established as an IT delivery paradigm and becoming increasingly mature in terms what what can be delivered and pervasive in its presence, I’m hearing increasing murmur around different concerns now that security and risk are better understood by decision makers.

Now that IT leaders are beyond the concerns that held many of them back from early adopting the cloud, consideration is being given to issues other than security that may inhibit adoption. What is emerging in my experience is the vexing of IT leaders around two subjects; complexity and user pushback.

Overcoming Obstacles

As counter-intuitive as it may seem, I’m coming across organizational obstacles that are driving the necessity to increase complexity, not simplicity.

Recent conversations with IT leaders in the context of my latest venture, extaCloud, have identified a number of common challenges being faced, such as:

Convincing the Boardroom of medium sized and Enterprise class organizations that they don’t need to maintain on-premises mailboxes for high-level executives, key operational personnel or staffers engaged in ‘sensitive’ activities (e.g. R&D). The inherent uncertainty held around cloud usage for ‘important’, ‘confidential’ or ‘sensitive’ information remains and this results in a belief that a percentage of the user community require an on-premises Exchange implementation. This on-prem Exchange estate in turn requires hybrid infrastructure to support in-house messaging interop between the on-prem and cloud community.

Organizations that base their value in intellectual property or other types of industrial advantage are reluctant to enable cloud-only collaboration (or messaging) capability. They’re preferring to maintain on-premises SharePoint capability, and all of it’s associated hybrid plumbing. In the collaboration space this not only increases complexity but exacerbates the feature atrophy issue discussed below bi-laterally as well as continuing to give oxygen to the ‘silo’ challenges that inherently exists when ‘cross-collaboration’ is required.

IT leaders that have bought into the pre-Cloud Microsoft vision of products as platforms (SharePoint, Dynamics, BizTalk, etc.) are reluctant to turn their backs on project investments they worked hard to secure and deliver. Some are concerned about return on investment, others have more visceral fear over their reputation. This creates the analysis paralysis problem that has bobbed along hand-in-hand with SharePoint for a while now.

The challenges associated to these obstacles become exacerbated once the user voice gets swirled into the mix. The advance of user-empowered technology resulting in a more sophisticated user community which is then bolted onto the emergence and increasing prevalence of Shadow IT (when was the last time you met somebody that didn’t use DropBox?) means that today’s IT leaders who yesterday could bamboozle users with jargon now have no choice but to listen their users and react accordingly.

The user voice is now loud and powerful, gone are the days when IT could simply dictate to the business what would be in the datacentre and on the desktop.

Increasing Complexity

With the exception of required infrastructure (network, security, directory integration, etc.) it was previously expected that overall complexity in the IT estate should reduce when organizations moved to the cloud.

If you’re in the cloud, it was assumed that there would no longer be necessity to continue to deliver and maintain complex productivity deliveries plus all the upstream infrastructure needed to operate them.

It turns out that this hoped for reduction in complexity just isn’t happening for many. The IT leaders’ vision of being in the cloud thus being empowered to focus on productivity and application workloads is seemingly being realized at a superficial level only.

In estates where organizations hoped to no longer predominantly focus on the delivery of productivity applications and infrastructure to support their needs, the necessity to operate in hybrid scenarios is actually having the opposite effect; complexity is increasing.

When the cloud was new, the notion of operating in a hybrid state was pitched as being a stepping stone towards operational totality in the cloud. In reality, hybrid is being realized by all but the smallest of organizations as being a necessary steady state of operation so that requirements and risk can be balanced.

The Feature Atrophy Problem

What I call the ‘Feature Atrophy Problem’ manifests within organizations as post-migration pain felt by the now powerful users (and in some cases by ‘the business’ in a wider context) in several ways, such as:

Not being able to do something they could previously do (e.g. no full trust code in SharePoint Online resulting in the removal of something they had on-premises)

Technical limitations within the products that force the change of established behaviors (e.g. configuration and operational restrictions in Exchange Online that are not present in on-prem Exchange)

Desire to move away from the homologous environment of being a Microsoft only shop (e.g. the ‘DropBox is better than OneDrive’ challenge)

The core of the Feature Atrophy Problem is that organizations are struggling to understand how they can drive the necessary changes in user behavior when seeking to benefit from the cloud whilst introducing what the users often perceive as a step backwards in functionality.

Businesses have invested heavily in the on-premises server editions of Microsoft technologies. Their users have become familiar with, and in many cases quite adept at, leveraging the platforms for the benefit of themselves and the wider business and they don’t want to give that up.

In an effort to maximize their return on these investments, many organizations have heavily customized their on-premises Microsoft server estate, especially where ‘platform’ products such as SharePoint, BizTalk and Dynamics CRM are part of the technology mix.

Before the cloud (or more specifically, Software-as-a-Service productivity such as Office 365), users saw contextually specific fruits of the investment made by their organization. Users saw ‘features’ within the technology services delivered to them that improved how they worked. They saw business applications (project management, expenses management, document management, customer relationship management, etc.) that were relevant to how they worked and have become familiar with the benefits they reap from these features at personal, team and organizational levels.

The reality in today’s Enterprise is that where the delivery of on-premises Microsoft technologies has been successfully adopted, the users are invested. Big time.

If you take heavily customized in-house deliveries, strip them back to their core components (as an extreme example, think customized workflow driven document lifecycle management in on-prem SharePoint 2013 becoming document libraries within SharePoint Online sites stitched together with Microsoft Flow to provide ‘life cycle automation’ in SharePoint Online) and deliver that to the users proclaiming ‘progress!’ they are going to push back.

Users resist change at the best of times, if you fuel that resistance by taking away the tools that they say make their lives easier, a successful user adoption outcome is fairly unlikely.

Driving Change

Without full support of their user community, IT leaders are finding it challenging to drive change within their organizations. The hoped for benefits of shifting operations to the cloud are not being realized because lack of user support to go ‘all-in’ is driving the need for hybrid state which, in turn, drives up complexity.

In the world of IT, another way of saying ‘complexity’ is ‘cost’. Complexity in technology equals an increase in cost.

When IT leaders and the boardroom were beginning to buy into the cloud, they were buying into increased simplicity. After all; in IT, simplicity generally equals reduction in cost.

I’m not saying that deriving cost benefit from the cloud is either impossible or the only game in town. In fact, I’m saying quite the opposite. Thousands of businesses are definitely spending fewer hard earned dollars on IT so they can spend on things that directly matter to them and these organizations are also benefiting from the other plus points of being in the cloud such as agility (within themselves), elasticity (of consumption) and ubiquity (of access and delivery of IT).

Every day I see examples of how businesses increase their simplicity and benefit strategically, operationally and commercially from being in the cloud.

That being said, I am starting to notice that they tend to be a specific type, shape or size of business with some common characteristics oft including some or all the following:

The organizations that are finding it more challenging to seek and benefit from the opportunity of being in the cloud are the ones finding that to reap benefit they need to increase complexity, thus losing ground on the commercial benefits.

Is this a losing battle? I don’t believe so. It’s a patience game. To quote Sun Tzu:

‘If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by’

There are two facets to the waiting game required, one internal and the other external.

Internally, organizations need to chip away at the issues and insecurities that are driving the additional complexity caused by the fear of introduction of the cloud.

Executive stakeholders need to be convinced of the high secure, low risk capabilities of the today’s cloud. Users needs to be educated in how their old working practices, although ingrained, can be improved if the desire to improve is there. Support staff need to be shown how the cloud does not threaten their jobs, it presents an opportunity for them to grow. The chipping away list goes on.

Externally, cloud service providers (such as Microsoft) are evolving their offerings constantly. Improvements in the capabilities of their hybrid state offerings which reduce the complexity of hybrid implementations are coming out of their hangers almost daily. Clearly, when complexity is reduced the amount of investment required to move operations to the cloud will naturally reduce; less hybrid = less complexity = less cost.

When To Jump?

Answering this question is at the forefront of many-a-CIO’s mind. As with any waiting game; knowing, estimating or even guessing the right time to wait before invoking the change requires courage, instinct and more than a little patience.

The quota of patience required by many organizations is tricky to gauge. It’s a personal measure; each organization will be different and each CIO will have to rely on their own knowledge and instinct to know when to hold and when to charge.

Even the most risk averse CIO will recognize that the cloud paradigm is the future and that in the vast majority of cases, public cloud offerings hold the greatest opportunity and benefits to empower their organization, but only the patient will get the timing right.

The internal and external facets cited above are on an intercept course and knowing when the most effective point of intersection will occur probably requires some kind of CIO crystal ball to get spot on — and this is the fundamental challenge. In the face of the compromise and trade off, knowing when the right time to move to the cloud is to maximize benefit is the task in hand for those CIOs on the fence.

I’ve been cheekily comparing the position organisations are taking with regards to the GDPR with them being different zoo animals.

What I am seeing is organizations, regardless of where they are in the world, broadly falling into one of four pots: the Ostriches, the Swans, the Tree Frogs and the Lions.

The Ostriches are simply burying their heads and hoping the entire regulation simply does not apply to them – this seems to be true of many organisations homed outside of the EU – they’re convinced there is ‘nothing to see here’ and are carrying on regardless. These guys need to be worried.

The Swans are putting on a brave face whilst madly scrambling behind the scenes to pay the information ‘taxes’ they have not been paying as they go along. They’re trying to gather, audit, classify and generally get a grip on the information they have, why they have it and where it is. They’re the most engaged but they’ve got a sweat on behind closed doors.

The Tree Frogs are calm. They’re sat there on their branch just chirping ‘compliant!’ every few minutes. In some cases they do genuinely get it, they’ve been through the process to understand their compliance/risk position and they’re pretty chilled. In other cases, they just have not understood the obligations (and the risks) and think they’re all good – in many cases this belief has been driven by what they’re being told by IT partners and vendors, most of these guys are actually Ostriches, they just don’t know it. Therapy anyone?

The final group – the Lions – are the ones that are just backed into a corner and are lashing out at anybody within paws reach. They hate the EU, they hate information, they hate consultants trying to help them – they’re lashing out while secretly hoping the whole thing will just go away. Trouble is, it won’t go away, no matter how much you cross your paws and roar, the GDPR is arriving in May 2018.